


we were the flood, we were the body

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Grief/Mourning, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), What if Clint had gone over the cliff instead of Natasha?, aka sometimes a family is more than just blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 19:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19362937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: Later -- after the crying, after the phone calls, after the battles -- she’ll pore over every moment on that godforsaken planet. She’ll go over every tiny detail, pulling apart each thread of the memory like the cotton candy she used to share with Lila at the county fair. She’ll think about how she should’ve been faster, how she should’ve been stronger, how she should’ve been better. She was the Black Widow, after all. Black Widows never failed.She’ll live the rest of her life thinking about the fact that she’s alive because her best friend has done something seemingly baffling -- chosen her, believed in her, offered her a lifetime of peace as his last conscious decision, because he decided that she deserved a chance at the happiness she never thought she could attain.





	we were the flood, we were the body

**Author's Note:**

> Someone responded to a tweet I made about Endgame saying they wanted to see a version of the movie where Clint died instead of Natasha and Natasha was the one who had to take care of his family. Naturally, my mind went places because I have no chill and a lot of feelings. Also, I will die on a hill believing that found family, especially for Natasha, is the most important thing in the world. 
> 
> Title from Imagine Dragons.

His jump, in all honesty, is a thing of beauty.

It’s Clint’s majestic agility through and through, a brilliant showcase of the specific parts that make him the best fucking sharshooter in the world on full display, arms and limbs spread taut against a purple sky in the furthest reaches of space, and Natasha’s almost sorry no one except her will be able to see this perfect moment. He soars off the side of the cliff, and for one split second, he hangs suspended in the air as if he can hold himself there simply by sheer will or magic.

Then he falls.

Natasha knows she’s not moving fast enough. In her grief, in her distraction, everything about her movements are uncharacteristically a single second off -- her speed to catch him, the trajectory of her widow’s bite that she attempts to hook to his utility belt, her horrified yell. She jumps anyway, grabbing onto his waist and unleashing his grappling hook at the last second; the cord goes rigid as it hooks into a rock and her bones crash harshly against the hard cliffside. She bites down on a scream of pain as she clutches his hand, because right now, even though she’s sure she’s probably broken her hip or her back, nothing is more painful than this.

“Nat…”

He’s looking at her with eyes that are both resigned and scared, a mirror of emotions she’d seen at different moments in his life -- the same eyes that had been fearful but calm during the birth of his first son, the same eyes that had been terrified but decisive when he stood in front of her at gunpoint in Budapest.

“Lemme go.”

“ _No_.”

 _You know what I did. You know who I’ve become. You know what a monster I am._ She’d told him she didn’t care, because she didn’t judge people on their worst mistakes -- didn’t judge _him_ on his worst mistakes -- and still, he was telling her that it was okay. That she’d scrubbed herself clean enough and that her red wasn’t blood anymore, but sore skin from years of over cleansing redemption. Well, fuck him for thinking that she had done enough and that he deserved to let her have this win, this second chance at life, this noble death. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

“Tasha...please…”

She can count on the fingers of one hand how many times he’d used _Tasha_ throughout their relationship, because even the bad nightmares and scared hospital stays just got “Nat.” There was the come down after Loki, when he was still scared to push her limits. There was Lila’s birth, where he caught her holding the little girl in her arms the night Laura came home from the hospital, softly whispering her name in tired awe. There was the quinjet on the way home from Tokyo when he took her hand in his own, transferring hard-won assassin blood to her skin, the word a broken trail of letters on his tongue.

“It’s okay.”

It’s not okay. It’s not okay that he’s going to take the fall for her, that she’s going to have to go home and tell his family that their father had died. It’s not okay that she’s losing her grip with each passing second. It’s not okay that he’s always been this way -- a self-sacrificing bastard, someone ready to throw himself at death for the expense of someone else who he thought deserved better, because that’s how he was made. It’s not okay that she’s crying, tears dripping down her cheeks that she can’t control, because she’s not ready to lose him like this and there should be more time, they should have had more _time_.

None of it is okay, and right now, she hates him for thinking it is.

When he kicks away, propelling himself into the air again, she screams her throat raw. She kicks helplessly, trying to dislodge the cord tethering her to life, trying to force herself to join him in falling. She watches as his body careens towards the ground, making contact with the hard slabs of rock, red pooling in the back of his skull, legs and arms askew with eyes turned towards the sky -- towards her.

A bright light engulfs her, blinding her, and she wonders if this is her death, too.

Natasha Alianovna Romanova -- the girl with red in her ledger, the girl who lost her home and grew up having an allegiance to a country she’d never thought she’d set foot in -- wakes up in a shallow pool of water, confused and cold. Something warm pulses in the heart of her palm and she raises her hand cautiously, noticing a golden glow emitting from between her fingers.

Natasha Alianova Romanova -- the girl who found a family with the least likely group of people -- presses the button on her wrist, knowing she has about five seconds to figure out how to tell those people that she's coming back alone because one of them didn’t make it.

Natasha Alianova Romanova -- the girl who spent five years alone while her best friend disappeared into denial and hard anger -- clutches the soul stone in her hand and tries not to cry again as she resigns herself to a lifetime of being alone without him.

 

***

 

Natasha’s distracted by the phone.

She should be concerned with Bruce -- she _is_ concerned with Bruce -- but there’s something about the ringing phone that prompts her to shift her attention. It takes her a short moment to realize it’s Clint’s phone, and she reaches for it with shaking fingers, barely registering Laura’s face on the caller ID.

“Hello?”

“Nat? Nat.” Laura’s voice floods the line in relief. “What’s going on? Where’s Clint?”

“I -- he --” Natasha suddenly feels like she’s choking on an invisible weight, like she can’t breathe. “Fine. I have to go.”

Two minutes after she hangs up the phone, the compound explodes. Natasha’s thrown under heavy rock and rushing water and when she finds her focus again after coming to, she realizes the ruined gauntlet is lying within her reach -- and that apparently she’s not the only one who wants it.

She runs through the watery open tunnel, clutching the gauntlet between her fingers, dodging bullets and shooting her Widow’s bites at the aliens behind her. She runs for herself, for Clint, who had always been better at this kind of fighting, for Laura and Lila and Cooper and Nathaniel -- the family who will never see their father again.

She runs for a world that will never know the immeasurable sacrifice Clint Barton made to save it.

She watches Nebula shoot her time travel self, she watches Wanda and Peter return to life and charge headfirst into a deadly battle. She tells Wanda and Hope and Gamora and Mantis and Nebula and Carol and Valkyrie and Okoye and Pepper and Shuri they have help, and charges into oncoming fire because this is her now, a person who cares more for other people than she does for herself.

She watches Tony die.

Later -- after the crying, after the phone calls, after the battles -- she’ll pore over every moment on that godforsaken planet. She’ll go over every tiny detail, pulling apart each thread of the memory like the cotton candy she used to share with Lila at the county fair. She’ll think about how she should’ve been faster, how she should’ve been stronger, how she should’ve been better. She was the Black Widow, after all. Black Widows never failed.

She’ll live the rest of her life thinking about the fact that she’s alive because her best friend has done something seemingly baffling -- chosen her, believed in her, offered her a lifetime of peace as his last conscious decision, because he decided that she deserved a chance at the happiness she never thought she could attain.

 

***

 

Wanda helps her bury a handful of arrows at the lake near Tony’s house. They don’t mark the mound of dirt, except for a smooth round stone that Natasha finds near the water.

“Where do you go when you die?”

Wanda shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I always imagined there was a heaven somewhere -- that there was a resting place. But now...I’m not sure what I believe anymore.”

She doesn’t ask Wanda what happened when she was snapped. She wonders if there’s a heaven where Clint is joking with Pietro, annoying him the same way he did when he was alive, a heaven where Tony is ribbing him about his archer skills and where Vision is trading stories about the people they loved and lost. Maybe his mom and his dad and his brother were somewhere too, giving him an overdue welcome.

“I need to tell his family,” Natasha says, her eyes burning, because she hasn’t spoken to Laura since her phone call. “And I don’t know how.”

“Do you want me to come to the farm with you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I need to do it on my own.” Her hands fiddle with the silver chain around her neck; she hadn’t taken off the arrow necklace since she brought Clint home and at the time, she’d done it to be sentimental, because she was still hurting from his absence. Now, she’s glad she’d had the foresight to keep it on her, given that every other personal object -- not to mention the place she’d called home for so many years -- was destroyed forever.

Wanda places an arm around her shoulders, and Natasha leans into her hold. “I wish there was a way to tell him that we did it,” she says quietly. “That we won.”

Wanda lets out a quiet breath, nodding at the water. “He knows.”

Years ago, Natalia Alianovna Romanova -- a girl with fire in her hair and even more fire in her soul, a girl who had shunned the Red Room and gone rogue, a girl who had not yet learned how to love or think beyond herself -- had spit in an American man’s face when he offered her a chance to be better. She had thought about shooting him, but when he picked up his bow she realized she was scared to say yes and so she ran away instead.

“I wish there was a way to tell him,” she had told Yelena when she got back to her hideout, accepting a large flask. “That I wanted to be there.”

Yelena had watched her drink, her face a sour expression that Natasha recognized, because she knew she’d never bend for an American or anyone else after what they’d been through.

“He knows.”

The next day, Clint Barton of SHIELD came back and once again offered her a chance to be better. After that moment, Natasha Alianova Romanova, formerly of the Red Room and Mother Russia, became Natasha Romanoff of SHIELD and Strike Team Delta, and she never felt alone.

 

***

 

Natasha steps off the quinjet and is greeted by the smell of warm, Midwestern air. She takes the delicate and clear breeze into her lungs because after days of inhaling battle-worn oxygen and the heaviness of space, the soft, pine-scented gusts make her feel like she’s stepped into a different world altogether.

Since her first introduction to Clint, his farm had been her home in more ways than one. It was the only place in the world where she was allowed to be not just Natasha, not just Nat, not just Tasha, but all three. It was the only place where she could talk about missions but also bake cookies, where she could walk around in floral patterned pajamas but also spar in the middle of the night, where she could let children braid her hair and paint her nails and call her things like “Auntie Nat” but also sit with Clint and Laura and admit that she was scared about taking on an upcoming assignment.

After the snap, she knew immediately what happened to his family -- she hadn’t had to look hard to find out; a quick hack into the census the government was running confirmed that Laura, Lila, Cooper and Nathaniel Barton were no longer among the universe’s living population. Clint was listed as alive, but Natasha had been unable to track him and in the moment, she’d figured he was dealing with his grief by hiding out somewhere, that he would make his way to her eventually when he had leveled out. (She would have never imagined he would become _her_ , a senseless assassin who was tasting blood with each new kill, and she knows she’ll always regret being too upset to go after him before it was too late.)

It hurt her to imagine the farm, a place that had always been a beacon of warmth and hope, as somewhere that was now desolate and abandoned, a ghost house with dust taking up residence inside its walls instead of love. And so, every few months from right after the snap until right before Scott Lang showed up in New York, she traveled to Missouri on her own. She made sure the moldy food was thrown out and that rodents didn’t infest the kitchen, she kept the dirt away from baseball mitts and dolls and collectibles and photographs, she checked on appliances, she did laundry to keep the sheets and pillows fresh, and she weeded Laura’s garden.

As a ritual, after she finished each week of chores, she would make herself iced tea and stand on the porch, staring at the overgrown lawn and horse shaped wind chimes. She dreamed of being able to come home, to return to the place that always gave her so much peace and comfort.

She dreamed of being able to come home, to see Lila and Cooper and Nate stumbling out of the house, faces alight with smiles and tears as they run towards her with arms outstretched -- but not like this.

“Nat!”

“Nat, we thought you were gone like we were gone!”

“Nat, where’s dad?”

“Where’s dad?”

“Is daddy here?”

“Where’s Clint?”

Laura’s soft voice comes from far away, and Natasha manages to turn as much as she can with three children wrapped around her limbs like straightjackets. She buries her face in Lila’s hair -- the little girl is almost as tall as her now and it throws her off because the last time she’d seen her, she’d barely been able to reach Natasha’s middle -- then looks up and shakes her head as subtly as she can.

Laura’s face contorts into a look of anguish and shock, a look that’s quickly wiped clean with an ease that Natasha knows she had to have picked up from Clint when Lila speaks again.

“Nat, where’s dad?”

“Hey,” Natasha says with a small smile, gently untangling each child from her limbs. “Let’s go inside.”

Cooper glances at the quinjet which has settled a few yards away. “Is dad coming later?”

 

The first exposure Natasha had to Clint’s domestic life was when he brought her home after a botched mission. She’d never been to his farm before and would have preferred a calmer, more streamlined introduction, but he had refused SHIELD medical for his injuries and demanded to be flown home instead. Natasha wasn’t going to let him pilot a quinjet with blood loss and a half-stitched knife wound that clearly needed to be re-dressed, so they both ended up in his living room with Clint dripping blood onto the floor while Laura simply said, “I know you,” after Natasha was introduced.

“Is daddy okay?” Cooper had asked, toddling into the room with a concerned look and brown-blonde hair falling into his blue eyes.

“Oh, yeah, dad’s fine,” Clint replied with a smile, even though Natasha could tell he was physically fighting to keep the pain off his face. “Just a scratch. Doesn’t even hurt.”

Natasha had stood in the background while Cooper doted over his dad and while Laura fussed over his injuries, trying to figure out how he could act so calm while he obviously had to be freaking out. _Practice_ , she surmised, knowing that it couldn’t have been his first rodeo with this kind of thing. The longer she watched the scene in front of her unfold, the more she realized she couldn’t imagine ever keeping it together enough to be able to pretend she was fine in front of someone she truly cared about, because she had never known what it was like to have someone in her life who she truly cared about. Clint obviously did.

Later, she would go through it all. She would call Laura after New York and say “Clint’s been compromised,” she would call her after Hydra was exposed and assure her that he was safely undercover in Bahrain with no SHIELD contacts, she would call her after finding out he had been taken to the Raft, captured by the government.

 

Natasha places her arms around Cooper and Lila, leading them towards the house while Nate trails behind. She meets Laura’s eyes, seeing the unending pain.

 _You said everything was fine_ , Laura says without opening her mouth.

 _I didn’t know what to say_ , Natasha replies silently, feeling like she’s fallen into some helpless void.

Safely inside, she takes a moment to lean against the closed door while Laura picks up Nate and holds him gently.

“I wanted to come home with your dad,” Natasha starts as Lila and Cooper give her curious looks. “But I couldn’t bring him home. And I’m really sorry.”

She doesn’t know how to say it. She _can’t_ say it. She can’t say the words _he’s dead_ , she can’t think about the fact that there’s not even a body to bury, that his bones and his heart and everything that makes him Clint Barton is a cold corpse on an even colder planet years and miles away from 2023. She has to say the bare minimum and hope that her meaning is understood, because she needs to say _something_ just to get the news out.

Lila steps back, one hand covering her mouth as the realization sets in and Cooper looks at Laura with narrowed eyes.

“Mom?”

Laura swallows hard. “Natasha’s telling the truth,” she says softly, gripping Nate more tightly. “Dad’s not coming home.”

Cooper shakes his head. “No,” he says, looking out the window, as if he expects to see Clint walk up at any moment and prove them all wrong. “No, you’re lying. He _is_.”

“I’m sorry,” Natasha repeats, not knowing what else she can say. Lila stands in front of her, tears leaking from her eyes and Cooper bolts, charging up the stairs. Laura puts Nate down and he runs to his sister, who crouches down to hug him. Natasha wonders if the five year old has even comprehended what was going on; back then, three year old Cooper knew that his dad was hurt but that was because he had seen his injuries. There was no evidence of Clint being hurt in this case, there was just the implication that their dad wasn’t coming home -- not today, not tomorrow, not at all.

Arms free, Laura finally turns to Natasha. She falls into her hug without speaking, holding her body tightly, as if by doing so she can siphon out all the grief, all the pain, and all the hurt that she’s just brought into this family.

 _Her_ family.

They had always been her family, but now, that feeling carried more weight than ever.

 

***

 

They talked about it, from time to time -- on missions, while shopping, during drinks in a bar on off hours -- they talked about what they would say or do if either of them died.

Natasha had never thought about her death in terms of what it would mean to people because until a few years ago, no one had cared whether or not she lived or died. The circle of people had grown from one person to four people to a small handful, but even so, Natasha knew she would always abide by the same plan -- craft a goodbye note that she’d already penned and hidden in a safehouse only Clint knew about, leave some weapons and goods in memoriam, make sure her private savings account was filled with a large sum of money for the rest of the Barton family.

Clint Barton didn’t have a will -- Natasha knew this. Years ago, him and Laura had drawn up some papers with SHIELD that detailed assets and life insurance policies and all the important things that came with signing your life away to a secret government agency that could potentially bring harm to your family, but Clint didn’t have a personal plan for his belongings or his weapons or his legacy, which Natasha always found a little bit strange. It wasn’t such a big deal for _her_ not to have those things, because she knew she didn’t have domestic stability. But he had people in his life who were more than just friends and partners and co-workers, he had a wife who loved him and children who thought the world of him, and it always unsettled her just a little bit that there was no real plan in place.

“I guess Laura would be used to it,” were Clint’s thoughts when she asked one day. “I mean, we almost die a lot anyway.”

“There’s a difference between bleeding out on the floor of your living room and me telling your wife that you’re dead,” Natasha replied bluntly.

Clint shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Well, the good news is, if anything really happened, at least they’d be taken care of.”

“By what?” Natasha asked sarcastically. “Your SHIELD pension?” She knew that Clint often put a large focus on what his job could provide for his family and she knew it was partially because he came from a childhood of nothing, that he never thought he’d have a family let alone any kind of life where he wouldn’t have to worry about having money to put food on the table.

“No,” Clint said, shaking his head as if she’s missing something obvious. “I mean, if anything ever happened to me, they’d be okay. They’d have you.”

 

“He did it to himself, you know,” Laura says later that night, after everyone is finally in bed. Her voice is scratchy from crying, hoarse and soft, her words shredded by rogue tears.

“No,” Natasha answers, drinking the tea she’s brought her. “He didn’t.”

“He did.” Laura looks sad. “He was always willing to throw himself at death. I hated him for it, but I knew I could never stop him...the self-sacrificial asshole.”

Natasha can’t help but laugh through her pain, recalling their last words on Vormir. _You’re a pain in my ass, you know that?_ They brought out the best in each other but they had always been each other’s worst nightmares -- as long as they were together. Alone, they had fallen apart; he had become an angry, grief-stricken vigilante and she had become a depressive, solitary hermit.

“After you disappeared, he was running around the world doing terrible things,” Natasha says quietly. “He was hurting people so he didn’t hurt himself, because he still had hope you would come back.”

Laura bites down on her bottom lip. “I know.”

“You know?”

Laura nods. “Yes,” she says heavily. “It’s hard to keep secrets when you have to figure out where five years of your life went. I guess I just wish I could’ve yelled at him one last time.”

Natasha looks down at her hands. “I tried to stop him,” she says, pushing back memories of every botched shot, every missed moment. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why I failed. If I had been one second faster --”

“We would’ve lost you instead. Or we would’ve lost both of you,” Laura interrupts. “That would’ve been worse.”

Maybe. Maybe it _would_ have been worse to lose both of them. But she can’t help feeling like she should have died instead, because she can’t imagine a scenario worse than losing your other half. Clint had been everything to her -- her best friend, her partner, her soulmate, and even though it wasn’t ever anything more than platonic, he loved her more than anyone had ever loved her in her entire life. She feels like a part of her soul has been ripped out of her body, like half of her is still hanging from a cliff back in 2014, and the pain hurts so badly that she can’t imagine how Laura must feel.

“It was never supposed to be this hard,” Natasha says, focusing on her tea so she doesn’t cry again.

“No, it was always supposed to be hard,” Laura says matter-of-factly, with the same calmness Natasha once saw Clint display as he bled out on his living room floor. “It was never supposed to be this easy.”

 

***

 

She sleeps on the couch downstairs because she doesn’t feel comfortable sleeping too close to anyone. She doesn’t want to listen to every toss and turn, every creak of the floorboards that might indicate someone can’t sleep, every soft sound that sounds like someone is crying.

She does get up sometime after two in the morning, though, opening her eyes to a darkened room and the sound of a sharp _twang_. Curiously, she pulls herself out of bed, walking to the window and turning on one of the nearby lights.

Lila’s standing outside in the dark, holding a bow, pulling back on the string. She releases an arrow and it zings forward with surprising force, smacking into the target board that’s been placed on the back of an old oak tree. Natasha holds her breath, wondering if she should turn the light back off, but Lila looks up and meets her eyes before she can move.

In a perfect world, she would go back to sleep, catalogue the moment, and let it be a secret between Auntie Nat and her favorite girl. She would maybe tell Clint a few years later that she’d found his daughter outside practicing with his weapons and she’d sneak in moments with Lila to give her pointers or help her perfect her craft when her dad wasn’t looking.

Natasha knows she can’t be Clint. She knows she can’t replace him, but she knows she can be the person who is there when someone else isn’t. She opens the front door, ignoring the squelch of the freshly wet grass against her bare toes, and walks across the lawn. Lila ignores her, continuing to shoot, and Natasha doesn’t say anything. She simply stands at Lila’s six, watching silently, the way she might watch Clint if she came across him doing the exact same thing.

“I missed the target,” Lila says softly after shooting another arrow, and although she doesn’t turn around, Natasha knows she’s talking to her.

“That’s okay.” She steps closer, squinting in the dark. “Can I help?”

Lila shrugs and Natasha takes that gesture to mean she can intervene. She gently nudges Lila’s feet into a more angular position and touches her shoulder gently, forcing her muscles to relax.

“You see the target? You see where you’re going?”

Lila nods. “Yeah.”

“Good. Now you have to worry about how you get there.”

 

She had asked Clint to teach her to shoot, not long after she had been brought into SHIELD. If she was being honest, it was because she was aggravated that there was one skill she didn’t have in her arsenal, one thing that he was better at and that he could pull rank on.

“You wanna learn because you care, or because you wanna be better than me?” Clint had asked without looking up from a report when she had come to him with her question.

“Of course I want to be better than you,” Natasha snapped, even though he’d repeatedly told her that being selfish wasn’t going to get her what she wanted. “So are you gonna teach me or not?”

In the end, he had agreed to a three hour training session where he taught her the basics of archery -- stance, tips, tricks, and advice, the last of which came in three different segments:

_You miss every shot you don’t take._

_Close enough is not good enough._

_Find out where you’re going -- then worry about how you’re going to get there._

 

Natasha stays behind Lila, watching as she raises her bow again. This time, when the arrow slings forward, it flies in a straight line and hits the outside of the yellow bullseye. Natasha smiles, looking down and seeing a mirror of Clint’s body in his daughter’s limbs, the same sharp fingers and agile bones that were indicative of someone who was born for this singular purpose.

“Nice job, Hawkeye.”

 

***

 

Pepper calls to invite them to Tony’s memorial. Natasha gets it -- he was a public figure, he gave his life to save the world, his contributions to both the Avengers and the world should be celebrated. As a friend, as someone who knew Tony the best of anyone on the team outside of Rhodey, she’s grateful he’s going to be getting acknowledgement for the person he’d become over the years. As a teammate, she wants to ask where the fuck Clint’s funeral is, considering without his sacrifice half the world would still be snapped away. But she has enough sense not to bring her own baggage into this situation, and so she just tells them that they’ll all be there and schedules a road trip, not wanting to put Clint’s kids further out of their comfort zone by flying them on the quinjet.

Two days before they leave, Natasha sits with Nate on the porch, letting the little boy spill into her arms even though he’s almost too big to be held the same way she’d hold him when he was a toddler.

“Do you understand what happened to dad?” she asks gently, putting her chin on his head. “Why he’s not here?”

Nate nods, shoving a piece of burnt toast in his mouth. “I think so,” he says, dribbling crumbs onto Natasha’s legs. “He’s in heaven, right? That’s what mommy said.”

“Yes.” Natasha closes her eyes. “He’s in heaven.”

“Being in heaven means you don’t come back again,” Nate continues, sounding sad, and Natasha takes a deep breath.

“That’s right. Dad isn’t coming back. But this weekend, we’re going to go see another friend who is also in heaven like dad is, and if you’re not okay with that, I’ll sit with you in the car so you don’t have to see anything.”

“Okay,” Nate says uncertainly as a soft rain begins to fall from a dreary sky, peppering their skin with Mother Nature’s own tears.

The drive to the lakehouse is unusually somber, the requisite kid squabbling almost non-existent and the conversations barely audible except when someone pipes up about needing to go to the bathroom or stop for food. Nate, who has been silent about his decision on whether or not he wants to watch the funeral proceedings, waffles when Laura presses him about what he wants to do but in the end he decides to go. He stands next to Natasha with his face pressed into her leg while Natasha keeps one comforting hand on his head and one arm tight around Lila’s shoulders, Laura making sure Cooper is within her reach.

She bolts afterwards, letting Laura make the inevitable small talk, because she doesn’t think she can see anyone right now. She doesn’t think she can look at her friends -- her family -- and have them look back at her knowing she’s the broken one, the one who lost everything, the one who failed at her job of being better, of keeping him safe. There was no reason for him to die, a soul for a soul was bullshit. They were Strike Team Delta. They were _them_. They could’ve figured out a workaround where they both came home if they had just stopped and thought about it and had more _time_.

“Romanoff.”

She doesn’t realize she’s walked right into Fury’s path until he speaks and when she looks up, her friend and mentor is looking at her with sad eyes.

“I’m so sorry.”

She doesn’t ask how she knows. Clint wasn’t here, which should be obvious enough evidence, but she wonders if someone told him the full story -- how he died, how he sacrificed himself, how she almost died instead. In any other situation, she would mask her vulnerability and take the words like a mission -- she would find out what he knew, what he heard, she would keep her voice steady and her temper level and have him see the Black Widow, not Natasha Romanoff. She can’t make herself do that, though, because she’s too tired and too sad.

“I know you are.”

Natasha pushes past him when he touches her shoulder, feeling guilty and wrecked at the same time. She prays for the trip home to be better, hoping the kids will pass out from the long day and not ask any questions, but Cooper speaks up as soon as they’ve left the lakehouse behind.

“So does dad get a funeral?”

Natasha is so startled by his question that she almost spills the coffee she’s grabbed on her way out. “I --” She glances at Laura, who doesn’t take her eyes off the road. “We haven’t talked about it.”

“Why?” Cooper asks, sounding annoyed. “I mean, isn’t someone gonna bring him home so we can put him in a coffin and stuff? That’s what happens when someone dies.”

Natasha knows that when someone dies, there’s a funeral, there are memorials and songs and tributes. Sometimes there’s a coffin and a body, a big limo that brings people to a grave site, prayers and words of condolence. But Clint’s body wasn’t here and she couldn’t get it, and to make matters worse, he was rotting away alone in a part of space where no one would ever find him or think to look for him.

There was no body for Tony, even though she knew there was. She assumes Pepper must have buried him in some private service, maybe in her own family’s plot or some plot the Stark family had acquired. But she can’t just pretend Clint’s body was going to get buried somewhere else while they threw a few arrows into a hole the same way she had done with Wanda, because while that felt okay in the moment, it wasn’t fair to his family.

“We’ll figure something out,” she says finally, because she feels like she can’t ignore the question. Cooper glares in the rearview mirror and his look makes Natasha feel like she’s sinking into a hole of failure.

It’s not until they get home that she realizes Fury has slipped a note into her coat pocket, a folded piece of paper that she takes out with shaking fingers. There’s a number on it, and also a scribble of letters that she reads with blurred vision.

_Barton’s files are cleared. Only request was for you to take care of his family. Call me if you ever need to talk._

 

***

 

Natasha has lived a life of death. She always felt like she was hiding in its shadow, courting it stealthily, waiting for it to hold out its hand and invite her into its darkness. She’d watched girls in the Red Room die and come back to life, and she’d seen what it did to them. Sometimes, she snapped when people said things like they wanted to die or they wished they were dead.

 _Do you know what it means to die?_ Natasha wanted to ask them. _Do you know what it feels like? It’s not a long sleep that’s peaceful. It’s cold and it’s scary and once you’ve experienced it, you know fear. You know that fear and it never goes away, because once you get close enough, you’re in death’s grip forever and then it’s just a matter of time before you stop existing in the world._

By all accounts, Vormir was supposed to be her final leap into death’s arms. But instead, death had laughed in her face and thought that she deserved to wrestle with her mortality one final time, taking someone else instead. Natasha had been left to figure out how to live in a world without the one person she always trusted to ground her and how to take care of a family that didn’t quite know what to do with their anchor permanently absent from its fabric.

And she hates it. Because there’s nothing that tells you what to do when someone dies. No one tells you how to be there when it gets to be too much, or how to tiptoe around emotions, or how to handle someone else’s grief. When Lila disappears from school, a concerned call from her teacher pulling Laura into a panic attack, Natasha is the one who goes out and searches the streets until she figures out that Lila has ditched her afternoon classes because she doesn’t want people asking her about her dad anymore. When Cooper throws an unusually immature tantrum over the books Natasha has picked out from the library, she eventually understands that it’s because the _Boxcar Children_ series were the last books he had read with Clint before he disappeared. When the washing machine breaks and Laura breaks with it, Natasha realizes it’s because Clint was the one who usually handled all the house repairs. She stays up until one in the morning, watching YouTube videos in the dark and searching websites, trying to fix things as best she can in lieu of having to call someone to come to the house.

One night, Natasha is jolted out of sleep by the sound of something crashing to the floor, and she bolts upright on the couch, immediately defensive with her posture as she breathes quietly in the dark. After a few moments of silence, she gets up and starts moving around the house, startled to come across Laura in one of the back rooms, surrounded by old photo albums and boxes.

“Hey,” she says quietly, announcing herself by peeking inside the room. “I heard a noise. You okay?”

Laura looks up and even in the dark, Natasha can tell she’s been crying. “The last thing I said to him before I -- before he died -- I yelled at him to stop practicing archery and to come eat lunch.” Her fingers shake as she sifts through stray photos. “It was so stupid. I wish I would’ve said something else. I wish I would’ve known what was going to happen.”

Natasha clenches her jaw to keep herself from breaking down, and joins her on the floor.

“He knew you loved him,” Natasha says softly. “He always knew you loved him, even in his worst moments. I don’t think you ever have to worry about him not knowing, even now.”

It feels like an empty sentiment, like she’s just saying the words to make her feel better, but Laura nods.

“I know.”

Moonlight streaming through the windows, Natasha helps Laura continue to look through old photographs, her eyes falling over forever frozen memories of someone loved the people he cared about more than he’d ever admit.

 

***

 

She practices her sparring moves and stretches on the front porch, pushing herself to the limits despite the fact she’s eating and sleeping less because she has nightmares of something happening to his family and not being able to protect them. Laura catches her one early morning when she comes downstairs before anyone else is up.

“Nat, it’s freezing,” she says, opening the door and shivering in the cold morning air. “Come inside.”

“I’m fine,” Natasha replies automatically, even though she’s really not. Aside from being cold, she’s sore and aching and her vision is slightly blurry. Laura sighs, closing the door, and Natasha thinks she’s leaving her alone only to turn around at the sound of the door opening again.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she repeats as Laura hands her a blanket, but she stops punching thin air and accepts the fuzzy afghan, letting her body slump to the ground. Laura leans against the doorway, arms wrapped around her middle, and for a long time, neither of them speak.

“I wasn’t good enough to save him,” Natasha says finally, getting up so she can look Laura in the eyes. “So I need to be good enough now. And if you can’t accept that, then I can’t protect this family, and I don’t deserve to be here.” She doesn’t wait for an answer before she pushes past her, heading back inside and up the stairs so she can lock herself in the bathroom.

“Why did you do it?” she asks out loud once she closes the door and has turned on the shower to drown out her words. “Why did you trust me so much? Why did you put this all on me and leave me alone like this? _Why_?” She thinks there’s an answer hidden in the sudden rush of water, but she’s been hearing his voice a lot in her mind lately, so she dismisses it as yet another manifestation of the grief that she can’t move past.

Lila wears her father’s bow around the house and doesn’t tell anyone why, but Natasha knows it’s because she wants to carry something around with her that belonged to him. Laura only tells her that she can’t sleep in it, and they both watch in quiet pain as she wears the scars of her father’s death outwardly, a memory and also an exercise in grief.

Nate shows his grief in less visible ways. He doesn’t talk openly about death the way Lila and Cooper do, but he picks up a fascination with animals and Natasha often finds him outside by himself, looking at birds or worms or snakes in the garden.

“You okay?” Natasha asks one day when she brings him lunch, putting the plate on the ground next to where he’s lying on his stomach.

“Yeah,” Nate says with a nod. He picks up the sandwich with one hand and Natasha looks at the small anthole he’s been focusing on.

“You like watching the ants? Did dad do that with you?”

“No,” Nate answers. “But I talk to them. I give them messages for dad. In case one of them goes away they can tell him things from me.”

Natasha is slowly realizing, through no fault of her own (though it might feel like her fault forever) that as close as she was to Clint’s family, there were things she just didn’t know because she wasn’t there every single day the way he was. She didn’t know if he had these small moments with Nate, or if he gave Lila extra dessert before bed, or if he made a drink for Laura when she was upset, or if he left notes in Cooper’s room just for fun. She was a part of his family in every way but the smallest ones.

She sits down, pushing hair behind her ear, trying not to let her voice crack. “You know, your dad is watching you even though you can’t see him.”

“I know. Mommy tells that to me too. But I like talking to the ants.”

“Who else do you talk to?” Natasha asks, and Nate frowns in thought.

“The birds. And the snakes. And the mice.” He looks up at Natasha, a heart-shaped face nestled in a picture of sadness. “Do you wanna talk to them?”

 

When Natasha was five years old, she was sitting in a room learning Russian. She was learning words like “command” and “bullet” and “talk” and “obey,” she wasn’t sitting in the middle of the lawn talking to insects or playing with dolls. When girls were brought back to the Red Room and told they were “sick,” she didn’t try to make them feel better because she was taught not to get attached and not to show vulnerability.

By the time Natasha had become integrated into Clint’s family, she had shed enough of her conditioning to bend a little bit to the domestic life she apparently was supposed to be a part of, but she still felt awkward sitting around the dinner table laughing at children’s stories, or holding back hair over the toilet during a stomach virus, or bandaging a scraped knee after a treehouse fall. Although Clint’s children never made her feel like she didn’t belong, it bothered her that she couldn’t make her reactions to even the smallest things come easy.

“How do you do it?” Natasha had asked Clint one day while he was making breakfast. “How do you do...this?”

“Make eggs?” Clint asked, clearly playing with her. He’d sobered once she gave him her best death stare. “I don’t know. I mean, I never really thought about it like a job. SHIELD is my job. Being a parent is just...life. I had a shitty childhood and I thought, if I ever have kids of my own, I’m gonna be the best damn dad in the whole world because I never got to have that. So that’s what I try to be. The best damn dad. Is that too cheesy an answer for you?”

Natasha smiled. “A little bit.”

 

“I think,” Natasha says carefully, “I’d like to talk to the ants. I have something I wanna tell your dad.”

Nate smiles as Natasha edges down, joining him in the dirt.

“Hey, Clint,” she starts, trying not to feel totally out of place or let all her emotions out. “I had eggs today and I thought of you.”

 

***

 

Laura doesn’t ask her how long she’s staying, and the more time she spends at the farm, the more she realizes that she has no intention of leaving. Clint had asked her to take care of his family, and that was what she was going to do. That was what she wanted to do -- what she _needed_ to do. That was her job now, and even if the world gave her another job to do, she knows she would still be here at the farm, protecting the people she loved.

So she gets up at five in the morning to help clean the house when Laura’s too tired to do it herself. She makes coffee to take one extra chore off the morning routine plate that seems to always be spinning. She helps Cooper with his homework, finding that even though she never went to an actual school, her spy skills and calculating brain are useful for more than just missions. She takes Lila to the mall to try on new dresses, and she brings Nate to the playground.

“You don’t have to do this,” Laura says when she comes home from a yoga class and finds Natasha on her hands and knees, scrubbing a stubborn dirt stain out of the floor.

Natasha barely glances up as she enters. “Do what?”

“Be a parent.”

Natasha stops scrubbing in mid-motion, one hand clutching the dirty rag. “Maybe you think I don’t need to be one,” she says after swallowing down a bout of tears. “But _they_ need me to be one.”

Laura delicately shifts her balance as she walks forward, bending down to place a hand on Natasha’s back. “They _have_ a parent.”

“They have _one_ parent,” Natasha replies bluntly, and it hurts her to say it out loud. “They should have two, and they don’t. That’s on me. I need to be one.”

“You don’t,” Laura says softly. “Natasha, no one expects you to fix this.”

“No one expected me to be the one left to fix it, either.”

“No,” Laura says, shaking her head. “You’re right. But that doesn’t mean you have to prove yourself to this family.”

 

 _Family_ was a word Natasha hadn’t known until she met Clint -- until she joined the Avengers. But Clint had been her first family, one person who gave her outstretched hands and laughed at her morbid jokes and let her cry after a bad dream. She had learned what it meant to be loyal to someone even when you might not trust them, and she had learned what it meant to keep parts of your life tucked away while still being a full, complete person.

She learned that you didn’t have to be black or white, better or worse, good or bad, loved or unloved, one or the other.

And so she had proved herself. She had proved herself when Clint left her alone with his children because he trusted they would open up to her despite how uncomfortable she felt. She had proved herself when Laura gave her a gift card to buy her own clothes, a sign that she was invited to keep more than just a toothbrush at the house. She had proved herself when she had sat down and comforted Cooper, who she found crying after school one day because he’d gotten into a fight with his best friend.

With the foundation of a partner and a family who trusted her under her feet, she tried to create a family like the one she always dreamed of having. She had proved herself when she went looking for Bruce and stood in front of Loki, putting herself in more danger than any of her teammates would later on in battle. She had proved herself when Steve didn’t trust her for not telling him about her separate missions. She had proved herself when Tony called her out for being the slippery spy she once entered his life as. She had proved herself when she went underground to protect the people who couldn’t be protected now that the Avengers were no longer allowed to lead, when everyone expected her to run and hide.

And then, for five years, she had done nothing but prove herself. Everyone else moved on or in Clint’s case, decided to embrace denial, but somehow, in a world where everyone wanted to do what she had once done -- run and hide, focus on themselves, serve their own agendas -- she had taken up the mantle of selfless leader.

 

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” Natasha admits, feeling defeated. “I’m sorry. I’m -- I’m so sorry.”

Laura’s face wrinkles in curiosity. “Why?”

“Because.” Natasha lets herself pause, unsure of how to continue. “You’re not a family now. Because of me, you’re not a family anymore.”

Laura smiles sadly, putting a soft hand against Natasha’s cheek as she turns her face towards her. “A family doesn’t mean you’re all bound by blood,” she says gently. “Sometimes, a family is a mother and her children, and an Auntie Nat who loves those children more than anyone in the world.”

Natasha knows she’s going to cry and she also knows that Laura will let her, because as much as it hurts, she knows Laura would tell her that family is this, too -- a simple, silent hug during routine daily chores because you feel too much to function and you need to lean on someone else who understands that.

 

***

 

Life doesn’t get easier, because nothing like this ever becomes easy. But there is a semblance of moving on. Nate names his new teddy bear after his father and Lila cries less; she doesn’t carry her bow around as frequently but it sits in her room, propped up against her dresser where she can always see it. Laura makes her a bracelet out of Clint’s old arrowheads that she wears religiously, even in the shower.

Cooper doesn’t ask as many questions about death, but he does speak up more about missing his dad, which Natasha recognizes as him trying to cope with his feelings and address them rather than hide them.

Laura takes Clint’s wedding ring from where it’s been hidden in her jewelry box and wears it around her neck. She changes a few things around the house and puts up more pictures of Clint from his SHIELD days, photos that Natasha knows she would usually never display because the farm was always where he was a father, not an agent. She takes classes in carpentry and woodworking so that she can pick up where Clint’s left off in all his projects, so that the house still can remain the same open, loving, workable home it’s been for so many years.

Natasha starts wearing her arrow necklace again. She had taken it off when she first came back to the farm, worried that Laura would see her wearing it and know something was wrong, which was silly -- of course Laura would know something was wrong as soon as she stepped off the quinjet by herself. But she hadn’t found the strength to put it back on again, because for the first time, wearing it felt like a real statement that she was carrying around something in memory of someone who wasn’t coming back.

“I want to give him a funeral.”

Natasha comes to Laura in the middle of the day fresh out of the shower, a face mask still in place on her cheeks. To her credit, Laura doesn’t react to her appearance.

“Are you sure?”

Natasha’s not sure, now that she’s said it. She’d been standing in the bathroom, thinking of Cooper’s question on the way back from Tony’s memorial, and she’d been overcome with a need to feel like she was doing something more than just making home improvement changes and cooking dinner. But the way it comes out, she realizes that it seems like she’s made the executive decision when Laura really should be the one with the authority to say whether he should have a funeral or not.

“I just --” Natasha breaks off, hesitating. “I think we should. If you think we should.”

Laura looks a little sad, glancing around the house. “We don’t have a body.”

Natasha closes her eyes. “I know we don’t,” she says haltingly. “But we don’t need one. We have memories. And we have clothes and weapons and pictures. We don’t need to bury anything, we don’t even need anything physical, we just need a memorial. We need closure.” She swallows. “ _I_ need closure.”

Laura doesn’t say anything for a long time, turning her gaze towards the window. “He liked that big tree in the front yard,” she says after a lengthy silence. “When we moved here, he made me a picnic because the stove didn’t work yet and all the stores in town were closed. That’s where Lila wanted her first tree house. That’s where he would read to Nate sometimes in the summer.” She stops, and it looks like she’s debating what else she wants to say. “That’s where I was standing when you called and told me he had been taken by Loki.”

Natasha’s breath catches in her throat, and she nods. “I like that tree, too.”

Later, Laura makes ice cream sundaes and puts on _The Wizard of Oz_ for a movie night. As spoons are being scraped against plastic bowls and mouths are being wiped clean of chocolate, Natasha clears her throat and turns around on the couch.

“I think we’d like to give your dad a funeral. Like the kind of funeral we had for Tony. Are you guys okay with that?”

All three kids nod, though Nate looks a little hesitant while doing so. When Natasha leads him upstairs to brush his teeth, she quietly asks if he’s okay, and he shakes his head.

“If we have a funeral, will I still be able to talk to dad or will he be gone forever?”

 

The first time Natasha felt like she had to be a mom or someone of maternal nature wasn’t when she read a bedtime story or when she made someone’s lunch because Clint was too busy and Laura had to make an important phone call. It was when she was sitting outside on the porch with a glass of whiskey, trying to clear her head from a mission that she knew she was taking way too hard, and Cooper had walked outside unaware of Natasha’s apparent crisis.

“Will you sit with me?”

Natasha had turned to see his face, clearly upset for a reason that he wasn’t going to disclose, and knew in that moment that he didn’t need to talk -- he just needed someone to hold him and assure him that it was going to be okay. She knew because she had come to Clint so many times just like this, not willing to say what was bothering her but just needing to be held by someone who she trusted, who would make her feel safe.

_Will you sit with me?_

And so Natasha put aside her own thoughts and worries and pulled Cooper into her lap and the little boy had snuggled into her chest and stayed there, breathing easily while the sound of someone’s lawn mower sang harshly in the distance.

 

Natasha bends down on one knee, stroking his hair. “Your dad will always be with you,” she says firmly. “No matter how long it’s been or what we to do honor him -- he’ll always be right there, in your head or in your dreams. And he’ll be there for you to talk to. You know that, right?”

Nate nods. “Yes,” he says in a small voice. “But I just wanted to be sure.”

“I know,” Natasha says, hugging him tightly. “I’m telling you that you can believe me when I say that I’m sure. Okay?”

They decide to hold Clint’s funeral on a sunny Saturday in the middle of June. Natasha wakes up early and takes a walk by herself, watching the sun rise slowly, a glowing ball of orange that reminds her of the stone she held in her hand after Clint had died. Sometimes, she can still feel its warmth, burning through her skin as if she’s been branded.

Sometimes, she can’t feel it at all, because some of the memories of so many months ago are starting to feel less vibrant.

By the time she gets back to the farm, Laura’s already started breakfast and Natasha can hear the shower going upstairs. She makes herself coffee and sits down at the table, feeling like she should help out but also feeling like she doesn’t want to get in the way, because today is already going to be a day of tiptoeing around everyone’s feelings. Laura comes to sit with her anyway, taking advantage of the quiet moment.

“Are you ready?”

_Have I ever been ready?_

“Maybe,” she says, because it’s the most honest answer she can give.

She doesn’t dress Cooper and Lila, but she helps Lila pick out a black dress when she can’t choose and lets Nate carry his teddy bear with him down to the tree, where they’ve set up a small wreath of sunflowers. As stares down at the ground, letting the bright colors of nature blur her vision like smeared watercolor, she hears Laura’s voice behind her.

“I decided to invite some people,” she says as Natasha’s ears register the unmistakable sound of a quinjet. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Natasha turns around slowly and sees Wanda stepping off the landing pad followed by Bruce, who somehow looks less massive against the huge trees surrounding the plane. Sam is behind him, Bucky trailing and looking a little out of place.

Natasha recognizes other people too, some walking and some driving, all starting to come up the road. The man whose tractor Clint had helped fix a few months ago while she was visiting, whose name she never even asked for. The family from a few houses over who sometimes had playdates with Cooper because they were the same age. A woman who worked at the farmer’s market where Clint and Laura usually went on Sundays. An old circus friend, tattoos covering every available inch of skin and a head shaved clean of any hair who she’d only seen in photographs that Clint kept in an album underneath his bed. She has no idea how Laura’s had the time or energy to find these people and corral them all together, but she finds herself welling up with emotion, because this was bigger than her. This was bigger than Laura, than Cooper and Lila and Nate. Clint had died -- had _let_ himself die -- because he wanted to give her a legacy, because he wanted to give up his life for hers, a gift no one had ever thought about giving her. _This is my legacy_ , she hears him say as everyone starts to walk towards the tree, gathering in a clumped semi circle. _This why I needed you to live, Nat. So you could take care of my family. So you could be remembered by the woman who sells eggs and the random person who lives down the road._

Clint wasn’t Tony, and he didn’t champion a world of superheroes into existence by making the smartest and best suits of armor in the world. But he did help people. He inspired people, and he was kind to people, and he loved people for who they were, for who they could be, for who they wanted to be. Tony was known for being a superhero, but Clint was known for being all the things Natasha always knew him as when she wasn’t working alongside him -- a father, a friend, a comfort, a partner, a helping hand, a smile at the end of a long day or at the beginning of a busy week.

Laura thanks everyone for coming and talks about a few memories from their marriage and also Clint’s SHIELD days. Wanda offers up an anecdote Natasha has never heard before, how after Lagos, Clint had taken her away for the weekend so she didn’t have to see the news of her mistakes. His circus friend talked about how no one would look at him when he joined because he was the weirdo, the skinny guy with too much ink who was too young and too inexperienced to be anything more than a lackey, but Clint offered to share his sandwich one night and let him shoot his bow and never gave a crap that he was different.

Natasha feels like she should say something. She feels like she owes it to him to say something, but she also feels like anything she might say -- that she hasn’t already said or thought -- is going to fall short, and the last thing she needs is to feel like she’s failed at saving his life _and_ giving him a proper memorial.

But everyone is looking at her, and Lila is standing next to her holding her hand, big eyes staring at her face in expectation, and so Natasha takes a deep breath.

“No one told us that only one of us would come home from that planet,” she says finally. “But even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The soul stone could only be retrieved by losing what you loved. And I don’t think I loved anyone more than I loved him.” She looks at Laura briefly as she says the words, comforted by her gentle smile. “He loved me enough to give me what I’ve never had -- the chance to live a real life. And that’s who he was to everyone who knew him.”

Laura invites people to pay their respects privately for the rest of the day or stay around if they want dinner or drinks -- the circus friend, Natasha notes, sits by the tree for a long time looking sad and contemplative, and Natasha wonders if what he’s thinking about. Sam and Bucky leave after giving out quick hugs, and Bruce spends some time talking to Laura but eventually leaves too. Instead of a hug, he puts his palm against Natasha’s, a sentiment that makes her feel grateful for a friendship that was never meant to be anything special but mattered, like so many of the relationships she had formed with the people she found a home with over the years.

The night starts to deepen, a dusky twilight that reminds Natasha of the nights she would sit on mission stakeouts with Clint and tease him about the stupidest things just to keep him awake. Neighbors leave and Wanda stays the longest of anyone, sitting in the grass with Cooper and Lila and Nate, creating gentle sparks of red light as the children watch in wide-eyed wonder.

Laura walks off by herself, just far enough for Natasha to make out her profile in the waning summer light, and she turns her gaze to the scene around her and thinks of the word _family_. She raises her glass of wine in a silent toast, words she doesn’t have for the moment lost in her throat.

A single shooting star lights up the sky like a firework, rogue sparkles bathing her face, and as her palm burns warmly, she smiles in the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @isjustprogress.


End file.
